Tears Of Joy: Binding Of Isaac DLC Now Available

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This is quite bad for me personally. Binding of Isaac, you see, unhinged one of its many grotesque orifices and devoured my life last year. The number of hours I sank into Edmund McMillen’s blood-sweat-tear-and-excrement-based roguelike could be described as substantial. Conversely, activities that failed to receive that designation during a similar timeframe include eating, sleeping, and not being presumed dead by most of my friends and family members. So, while you say hello to Binding of Isaac’s Wrath of the Lamb downloadable expansion, I say goodbye. Probably forever.

Among, like, a million-zillion other bits and bobs, Wrath of the Lamb includes 100 new items (for a total of over 235), 5+ new chapters, 15+ new bosses, 20+ new enemies, and – perhaps most enticingly – “tons of new random happenings, curses, blessings, npcs, fortune tellers and more.” Oh, and that doesn’t even include the last bullet point, which is dedicated to “more super secrets than you’d probably expect… good luck finding them all.” All of that adds up to roughly 50 percent more content, according to McMillen. So basically, there could very well be another hundred or so hours worth of stuff to dig into here – depending on skill, luck, etc.

It’ll run you a whopping $2.99 (£1.99), and – if you’re only now looking to get in on the demented Zelda-esque action – Steam’s put Binding of Isaac proper on sale for more than 50 percent off. So that’s my bit, then. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play it until I reach the end of my natural lifespan. And then, after I’ve died cold and alone – but rich in totally rad items – I’ll write about it for all of you. So, uh, don’t go anywhere for the next 80 years or so. I’ll be right back. Promise!

73 Comments

“It’ll run you a whopping $2.99 (£1.99)”
And 2.99 euros, because that seems like an appropriate conversion.

I know it’s only 3 euros, and clearly nothing when compared to daily life things (I probably spent more on a jar of pesto, last shopping)… but it’s still pretty annoying to see that kind of conversion for mainland Europe.

(Although to be honest, clearly not the worst I’ve seen these last days. That would have to be Alice: madness returns on sale, 5.99 usd, 2.99 gbp, and 9.99 eur)

The original game was interesting, although disturbing (not a huge fan of the “dirty/gross” side of McMillen). Might get that once I go down on the “I have this to play” stack.

Didn’t know that about Alice: Madness Returns, I’m so, so glad I didn’t buy it now. Still trying to sell your game to us for €50 when it’s $30 and £15 (undiscounted)? You can stuff it up your fundament.

Same for me. Shame really but now I get slowdowns on the first floor already; without the DLC it usually started to happen in level 4 and lower with dozens of bullets of tears,piss and blood flying everywhere.

I put an hour into the DLC yesterday and have played for about 4 hours total and never experienced any slowdown anywhere. I had as many as 10 enemies onscreen during a Lord of Flies fight with goo and puddled tears all over the arena and my framerate remained golden.

Yeah, my game slows down eventually, but only when there’s a pretty vast number of sprites on the screen at once. I’m assuming that all of you people who complain about slow down every time Binding of Isaac is mentioned have in fact played the game since it was patched not long after release to alleviate much of the slow down issues, so I’m wondering why my laptop that’s getting a little long in the tooth now is running the game better than so many others.

Slowdowns haven’t been fixed, but it’s arguable whether they’re worse or not. My system very rarely had issues with vanilla Isaac, only slowing down to a (still pretty fast) “bullet time” speed when the screen was awash in enemies and projectiles.

With Wrath of the Lamb I get slowdown more often, but paradoxically it’s mostly in areas where little is going on. I can leave an empty room for another empty room and get 2-3s complete stops, then later fight scads of enemies without so much as a dropped frame. It’s not like you slow down with 10-25% less crap on the screen, but if your computer was crying more than Isaac before Wrath then the DLC won’t help.

Don’t let that dissuade you from getting Wrath entirely. Florian+Edmund are hard at work patching the game, with one patch less than 24hrs post-release and another coming this weekend. I’ve had plenty of flawless runs as well, but if you’re worried about the slowdown, I’d wait until the bugs are ironed out.

I wonder what the game will feel like with those 5+ (6?) new chapters. Part of what makes the original so compulsive is that a full playthrough is conceivably short enough to make you go for one more try before you quit. Then five hours pass and you’re left staring into space, confused and hungry.

It’s genius, you play through the game with some slight changes and/or start conditions. Like having no map for the entire playthrough, or havnig only one heart with 9 cat lives.
Aside from everything there already is in this addon, THIS is what really enhances playtime, because you WANT to COMPLETE them.

@nose

the length of the game is the same, the chapters are only alternative takes on the known levels. Wether you get the normal level or the alternate one is randomized

I love this game so much, but I lost my save game data after playing for like 40 hours :'(. During exams! What kind of idiot game requires a file in the root of the install directory AND a file in %APPDATA%?? And why didn’t it support Steam Cloud from the beginning?

Now it’s tears of pain every time something new comes out that I can’t motivate myself to enjoy.

I know how that feels. 60 hours of gameplay, assumed it’d be saved due to it being Steam Cloud enabled–formatted my laptop and reinstalled only to find a blank slate staring at me. And I’d even completed the damn thing ten times too.

I bought it in the humble bundle and I have no problem installing the addon. I mean it fully registered on steam, the whole game is steam bound, so I excepected nothing less.

And yeah, there still are bugs, but they are all cosmetic. Nothing I would want the game to be delayed for. I’ve been playing the addon for about 9 hours now, and I am completely satisfied.
The only minor flaw so far is that some items are just combinations or simple copies of old ones.

Loving this – as someone said elsewhere, it plays more like a romhack of the original, partially due to bugs and partially due to the amount of new stuff. The challenges are a hoot and a great way of pushing Golden Gods to their limit. I don’t think there’s been a better expansion since Alien Crossfire.

It took me a long time to get into the original – it was only after watching a lot of Northernlion’s let’s play on YouTube that I began to understand how utterly brilliant it is. The Binding of Isaac has to be the ultimate example of what looks simple on the surface is actually incredibly (and almost infinitely) deep and complex. Very clever game making indeed.

If you like, go to link to bindingofisaac.wikia.com and there’s a list of items and their effects available. Makes it easier. I didn’t use it originally to keep some of the mystery, but now when I forget exactly what an item does I go check it. Pretty handy.

I don’t know what any of the stuff does either. Doesn’t matter. It makes you better. Probably. Sometimes worse. Just go with it. The fun is discovering what random items you’ve been given to deal with random challenges.

I used to think that I’m an ok player – beat the game often enough to get all characters unlocked and all of the endings. But GOD DAMN is that DLC hard. I mean, partly it’s due to not knowing what the items do, but the special rooms are… brutal, sometimes.
Plus, I just picked up an item which totally ruined a run and build that should have been enough to finish the game. Exploding tears, ok, but… there was an enemy that I literally could not kill without killing myself first.
I guess it needs a bit of re-balance.

Other than that, it’s great to have more content – half the game is the constant suprises and what to make of them.

The best advice I can give for anyone having trouble with this game is go and watch Northernlion’s Let’s Play at link to youtube.com
It taught me me than I could ever have worked out on my own. And he’s highly amusing, to boot.

I’m a bit late here, but just some advice- one of the most important things about a good (and fun!!) play through imo is strategic (early as well as late) use of money/ keys/ bombs. Every early area has one secret room and one item room that you should get. Save a key for item rooms, and try to use a bomb to get the secret room on each level, which gets you enough money (hopefully) to start getting enough item/ cash momentum to be sweet/ be extremely well off for the rest of the game. Secret rooms are always sandwiched between three or four other rooms (eg on your map the rooms are in a U shape, or a O, shape, it’s between those, if there’s more than one, it’s guesswork time). Try and get into shop rooms if you need to buy keys/ bombs or have enough money to start buying items. Remember that you can bomb your way into rooms if you don’t have a key but have bombs. Good luck! Don’t be scared of jumping in and out of the first or second level a few times to get a good start. glhf! (; p.s. haven’t played expansion yet, so things may have changed! but hopefully some of this is still applicable

As far as I can tell, post expansion secret rooms are no longer always found in between the U and O shaped areas of the map. They can now be absolutely anywhere. Combined with there now being 2 secret rooms per level, this makes the items that let you see where they are on the map (Spelunker Helmet etc) far more valuable, and also changes the tactics of when and where to use bombs or save them.

Picked it up and finished it on my very first try. Those new items are way too over-powered and the last boss is a walk in the park. That’s even though there’s no way to know what trinkets do right now (no help text!). There’s all sorts of weird bugs… I can enter fenced off rooms if I have wings, sometimes old items will simply refuse to activate, the game will sometimes show the wrong item sprite when you pick an item up in a room with various other items, etc. I’m waiting for a patch before venturing any deeper. As it stands, I think this expo weakens the original game.